The Knights of the Right Answer

Phaedrus and Mr. Bubbles

Phaedrus was excited about his upcoming graduation from high school, the finish line for the Common Core. He was nervous, however, as he made his way through town to Curriculum Headquarters. His counselor assured him he could walk across the stage and take his bow. He’d been summoned to speak with Mr. Bubbles, an academic official. He hoped the storm his refusal to take the district summative reading comprehension test had blown over.

*

Bubbles asked him about his decision to boycott the reading test. He wasn’t happy with what Phaedrus was saying.

“My test doesn’t ask you what you think the text means,” Mr. Bubbles, the Chief Comprehension Officer for the district, said. “It asks you what the text means.”

Phaedrus was a problem for the Bubbles of the world. All along the conveyor belt his teachers had pegged him a top student. He was certified gifted and talented. Then in his sophomore year he began a pattern of failing some units of instruction utterly or doing magnificent work on his exams in others.

Was this an Einstein or a juvenile delinquent?

“But I can’t tell you what a text means,” Phaedrus replied. “I can only tell you what I think it means.”

“You’ve got to be joking. You do realize that no one cares what you think at this point?”

*

“What does the text say,” Mr. Bubbles rephrased. “Can you tell me that?”

“Texts don’t say anything,” Phaedrus replied. “People say things when they speak. Texts are silent. If they spoke, they would not be texts.”

“May I remind you, you are scheduled to receive your diploma this year,” Mr. Bubbles muttered, shaking his head. “How did this happen? Why are you jeopardizing your future over a test that we both know you can pass?”

He was sure the problem came from the achievement motivation division. Oh, for the good old days of early intense explicit motivation instruction, making teacher approval, gold stars, certificates, trinkets, and trophies salient to children.

Phaedrus was clearly dispositionally if not technically deficient in reading comprehension. If every reader were free to make of a text anything they like, how do we function? There must be a standard meaning, a troy ounce, especially if we intend to maintain the banking concept of schooling.

But dispositions are hard to define, much less observe and measure.

*

“Let me try again,” Mr. Bubbles said kindly. Kindness was scarce administration when it came to test scores.

There was something about Phaedrus. His confidence. His presence of mind. The potential graduate did make an implicit offer to say explicitly the meaning he had constructed from the text. He showed initiative and industry.

Bubbles appreciated that. Biases be damned. This person could comprehend. Something went haywire in those early years of explicit hegemony instruction when teachers are supposed to instill the autonomous text habit of mind. Dig for the right answer. Excavate the trenches of syntax for deposits of shared meaning.

In his younger days Mr. Bubbles had been vigorous in his defense of autonomous text. He had grown up singing the “four corners of the text” tune with his buddies on the academic playground:

“Everything you need is there right before your eyes, placed with care inside the text, right there for you to find. Just open your mouth and sing it out with prosody and force, and you will be blessed to learn a cow is not a horse.”

“Phaedrus, would you prefer that someone read the text aloud for you? Could you then tell me its meaning?”

“Which meaning?” Phaedrus asked.

*

He had no intention of raising the ire of the Big Bubble, as students in the district referred to him. He wanted to make his case. Just make his case. Phaedrus had, sadly for his parents, who wanted nothing more than to help him eventually find a good job with health benefits, given up living the double life, one in school, one in real life. Still, it would break his parents’ heart if he left without a diploma.

He could no longer live a life of split consciousness. In one life he thought what his teachers expected him to think when he read (and he read quite a lot) and kept to himself unless he was called on in class in one of those random checks teachers do when they pull names of children to call on out of a hat.

In the other life in the closet he tried his best to think for himself and talk about these meanings with people like Socrates and other students who happened to get interested in something like, oh, Greek mythology.

“How many meanings are there?” asked Mr. Bubbles.

“Now that’s a tough question.”

“Oh? Most people would agree there’s but one meaning per text.”

“I’m not sure of that,” said Phaedrus. “I used to think that, too. Then I realized, really, there is just one thing that stays the same for every reader. It’s not meaning.”

“A riddle for Mr. Bubbles. Pretty cheeky as you stand here ready to cross over into college or career. Go on. Out with it. What is that one thing you speak of?”

“The text. The text is the one thing we see alike. But even a text can change. Mr. Metaphor, my eighth grade English teacher, told us how Walt Whitman revised and published new versions of Leaves of Grass over forty years. So we are left with a family of texts.”

*

Mr. Bubbles was growing impatient. He’d heard much of this before, but never so determined, never from a student. Bubbles was boxed in. The Phonics War is child’s play compared to this Comprehension War if comprehension devolves into Fishlike interpretive communities, he thought.

The district expected every graduate to show evidence of reading comprehension sufficient for success in the afterlife of childhood by bubbling in the right answers on a test. It was that simple.

Suddenly, Mr. Bubbles flashed on a course he’d taken decades ago on the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Constructivism, yes, the making of meaning is reading comprehension, yes. In this flash something old he had learned but forgotten rose up in his consciousness: Piaget’s research method of clinical observation and interview.

Mr. Bubbles pivoted in his stance. Phaedrus could become a focus for a single-subject study using Piaget’s method and written up for submission to Reading Research Quarterly.

*

“I’ve decided to give you a full hearing, Phaedrus. Tell me what happened in your classes to turn you against the right answer.”

“I’m not against the right answer, Mr. Bubbles, not at all,” the soon-to-be-ready-for-college-or-career-with-a diploma Phaedrus said. “I like them.”

“Hmmm,” Mr. Bubbles uttered. “Would you mind unpacking that for me?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“Please, continue. I will keep this confidential.”

“In seventh grade my history teacher assigned in-class reading every day from the textbook. Chapters were broken up, and the pieces could be read in a fifty-minute period. I think the publishers planned it that way. We were to read the passages and write answers to the review questions. Then the teacher graded our papers.

One student finished reading and answering the questions quickly and got to read whatever she wanted. She always aced the quizzes. So I asked her how she did it. But I didn’t want to do it her way. It seemed pointless.”

*

Mr. Bubbles was taken aback when Phaedrus narrated his account of the process this student used to read and complete the questions in her history class.

In this case, the efficient and effective student learned to read backwards.

Bypassing the passage, she went first to question one and read it to pick out an important word. Knowing that the text aligned the first question with what came first in the passage, she scanned the first few sentences until she located the word. Context did the rest.

She became an expert in reading backwards, passed all the comprehension tests, and learned nothing. She got As.”

*

Phaedrus went on to tell the story of another teacher from middle school who assigned in-class readings followed by multiple-choice questions. But the whole reading scenario was different.

Teacher explained how two texts make one, that, together, the passage and the questions formed a unified text. They implicated one another. Each part could be read alone, but the two-part design was made to function as a single system.

Teacher asked his students to read the passage and then read the questions, ignoring the multiple choices. “Don’t get distracted by the distractors,” he said.

The next step was to assess the questions. There are good questions and bad questions, important ones and trivial ones. Like the history textbook, the questions aligned in textual space with their answers in the passage.

Sometimes the teacher instructed students to decide which questions could be improved, and the class would talk.

Sometimes the teacher asked students to pick the worst choice for each question. Then they would talk. Often, the discussion took a turn toward assessing the distractors.

Sometimes the teacher asked students to power through the passage and the test with limited time. He would give them the answer key. The task then was to defend either the official correct answer or offer a better one.

*

Mr. Bubbles decided to sign off on a diploma for Phaedrus. He was haunted by his talk, however.

One afternoon in his office he was scrolling through some emails from district headquarters and came across a referral to a blog by Chester Finn discussing a policy flap that took place among the people in charge of updating the framework for assessing reading comprehension at NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2021¹.

NAEP was preparing to revise the design of the test of comprehension for 2026. NAEP periodically assembles a Visioning panel of reading experts to make recommendations to its test design frameworks. This happened in 2019. A stellar group of reading researchers and experts approached the task with optimism and energy.

The past two decades of research had seen a fundamental shift in theoretical paradigm in the field of reading. The core theory of constructivism, viewing readers as active meaning-makers during reading rather than passive recipients of a transmission, had expanded in important ways.

Understanding of the role of prior knowledge in comprehension had enlarged—instead of simply acknowledging the role, current theory of comprehension held that assessment must account for its consequences. How a reader adjusts cognition to maximize and monitor prior knowledge is integral to comprehension as a process.

The definition of a text itself had been opened up since the 1990s to include digital displays. The panel offered a vision that saw constructivism in the context of sociocultural theory. Reading was a part of a larger literacy competence.

*

Chester Finn and a handful of other influential voices infiltrated the NAEP process and managed to shut down the most impactful sociocultural revisioning. Much will be published in the future about this missed opportunity to bring reading comprehension into alignment with sociocultural theory in psychometric reality in 2026.

Chester Finn was delighted when the Board approved a design framework not all that much different from the one Mr. Bubbles was used to.

Finn described the new design elements most offensive to his comprehension sensibility. Innovations included making changes to “universal design elements” or “UDEs.” Here is what Finn had to say about UDEs.

Finn didn’t buy into the idea of UDEs. The idea of orienting, guiding, and motivating a reader hardly fit with Finn’s ‘typical reading situation.’ Mr. Bubbles scratched his head as he read.

He would have ordinarily agreed with Finn, but Phaedrus was in his thinking, and he wasn’t so sure that testing situations guarded by the Knights of the Right Answer are aligned at all with non-testing reading scenarios.

Finn enacted the kind of egocentric thinking about reading characteristic of a non-expert, the kind of blindness to context that sociocultural theory sought to clarify.

Some UDEs might have helped Finn better demonstrate his prowess getting somebody else’s right answer. Finn betrays a firm non-understanding of sociocultural approaches to human learning, including reading:

The second paragraph in this excerpt caused Mr. Bubbles to raise his eye brows. “I could more or less figure it out with a bit of effort,” writes Finn. Is this not useful assessment information? thought Mr. Bubbles.

This reader, Mr. Finn, is aware that comprehension is an active process requiring motivation. He can monitor his progress and make executive decisions: “Possibly I could look that one up,” he writes.

But the kicker is his full-throated acknowledgement of the role of prior knowledge and inference in meaning-making with textual displays.

Mr. Bubbles didn’t know what to make of Finn’s asides. Finn could look that word up in the real world—“which I realize test takers can’t do.” And the Finn gasp of horror: “What if this was part of an assessment of my comprehension?”

What if I were called before the Knights of the Right Answer and had to come up with the correct choice? “Should the test developers make it easier on me?”

Mr. Bubbles gasped in horror himself at the realization that the test developers were making it harder for Phaedrus to take himself seriously as a content-area reader.

Should understanding be judged by what I can do for myself forced into the four corners of the text? One can only hope that all readers have access to a sociocultural surround that “inflates” their ability to comprehend. Heaven forbid that comprehension is ever masked or faked.

*

As Chief Comprehension Officer for his district, Mr. Bubbles experienced a degree of disequilibrium. He felt sad that the 2026 NAEP test would be designed without the benefit of scientific research over the past twenty years. It was worse to think that the tests were not be redesigned again until 2041. NAEP has a history of being a pioneer.

[NOTE: A thematically related post in this newsletter is available here:

Beyond the Bubble

1. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/27-cheers-naep-reading-framework